The Human Skill That Eludes AI

There is an interesting article in the Atlantic this week about AI's Writing Skill. This was an interesting take that I have not been hearing in the mainstream media which tend to drown out all other stories with their overblown doomsday predictions of total global job annihilation. This article helps put AI writing skills in perspective, though admittedly, those skills are likely to improve as time passes. It's also worth nothing that all three people in this conversation are authors/journalists, so maybe file this under wishful thinking.

This is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-creative-writing/686418/

The article is behind a paywall (so I didn't read it). I learned about it on an interview with the author on one of my regular weekly, techy, news podcasts: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/podcasts/hardfork-ai-washing-tokenmaxxing.html

The interview starts just after the 20min mark if you don't care to listen to their opening banter.

Following up on the recent mentions of tokens on Author Update, there's also a decent good conversation on AI token usage that follows the interview (in case you're interested) and the effect of tracking job performance to token usage.